Celebrate the New Year with rubyfriends

Rubyists, let us get together to hangout, chat, eat and drink!

Classy Enum - A Ruby gem for classy developers

Do you loathe conditional logic? Does refactoring timid procedural code into confident object oriented logic get you excited? Do you like monocles? If you answered yes (or no) to any of these questions, you should come to this presentation.

Peter Brown will be discussing a Ruby gem called Classy Enum which adds class-based enumerator functionality to ActiveRecord attributes. He will demonstrate real use cases, and show you how you can incorporate the gem into your Ruby projects with little effort. You will also learn about alternatives to this gem that can be used where enums are not a good fit.

With Classy Enum, your code will be easier to test and maintain, making you the happiest Ruby developer you know.

We will be heading into town for drinks afterward which will also make you happy.

May Drinkup

Get together with old friends and new to talk about Ruby and have some fun.

Contributing to Ruby and An Introduction to JRuby

Contributing to Ruby

Newcomer or seasoned veteran looking to get involved with Ruby documentation? We’ll show you it’s not as scary as it may seem, and there’s plenty of ways to help. It’s important to give back to the open source community and improve things for future developers.

This talk will teach you the value of open-source, the benefits of contributing, and a little bit about how ruby-core works. You will learn what to look for when spotting documentation bugs in the MRI source code. We will cover the guidelines to writing MRI documentation, and how to submit a patch. Including helpful tricks using ri and rdoc.

Zachary Scott is a Ruby committer since September 2012 who will gladly help with your first patch into ruby-core.

An Introduction to JRuby

Grant Defayette will be presenting on the following surrounding JRuby.

1. What is JRuby and how is it different from MRI?
2. Why would anyone use JRuby instead of MRI?
3. Using Java code from Ruby.
   • Java swing example.
   • Custom Java class example.
4. Using Ruby code from Java.
   • Running ruby code from Java with JRuby’s Red Bridge.
   • Passing values to Ruby code from Java.
   • Getting results back from Ruby.

Intro to Object Oriented Programming in Ruby and Intro to ActiveAdmin

Intro to Object Oriented Programming in Ruby

Are you interested in writing code that is easier to test, integrate and maintain? Have you heard of things like polymorphism, inheritance and encapsulation but are never really sure how or when to use them? Join Peter Brown of Draker for an overview of object oriented programming concepts in the context of Ruby. He will discuss some basic and advanced OOP techniques, when and when not to apply them, and how to write maintainable code by testing and refactoring.

Intro to ActiveAdmin

One thing Ruby on Rails is really great at is CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Destroy). Ever think though “Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was even simpler?”. Well, ActiveAdmin is your answer. ActiveAdmin is a framework that abstracts common business application patterns (such as CRUD) while creating a simple and intuitive interface with a minimal amount of code. Join Tristan O’Neil of Gristmill for an overview of the framework. He will discuss why to use it, how to use it and might even subject himself to a live coding demo.

Responsible Metaprogramming in Rails

Often referred to as “magic”, Ruby metaprogramming techniques allow you to easily extend core Rails functionality. Pete Brown, lead software engineer at Draker, will discuss a some of the metaprogramming challenges he encountered while developing a Ruby library called Herd. Herd allows Rails developers to extract collection related logic into separate classes, not unlike collections in Backbone.js. Pete will explain the problem that Herd solves for his team, and walk through the source code (< 40 lines) which makes it possible. This talk is targeted toward web developers of all skill levels.

No food will be provided but you’re welcome to bring food and/or beer to the event.